11 Recommendations for Coming Up to Speed on Bitcoin

If you don’t know about Bitcoin yet, you will soon. Just like Friendster was the precursor to today’s on-line social networks and Napster foreshadowed modern online music distribution models, so too BitCoins might be a sign of upcoming approaches to distributed online financial transactions.

Bitcoin has been getting some attention lately in part due to the increasing value of this peer-to-peer currency. Here are a few articles for coming up to speed on Bitcoin and the recent incidents associated with it.

Getting Started With Bitcoin

Become familiar with the key Bitcoin concepts—what Bitcoin is, why it exists and how it is used—by reading the Bitcoin Wikipedia entry.

Understand some of the reasons for Bitcoin continuing to increase in value by reading SmartMoney’s perspective on the currency’s growth streak.

Take a look at the list of vendors who accept Bitcoin as a form of payment or who can exchange Bitcoins into traditional currencies.

Consider the Bitcoin mining tool written in JavaScript. It solves cryptographic problems to generate new Bitcoins while running in the browser of visitors to the miner’s website. Could this approach provide a new way for legitimate websites to generate revenue without displaying traditional ads? Might such code running inside malicious Flash ads provide a new revenue stream for online attackers?

Recent Bitcoin Incidents

Read about Silk Road—an online marketplace for drugs such as LSD and Cannabis—that only accepts Bitcoin as the form of payment. This story brought Bitcoin to the attention of many people outside the tech community, including lawmakers.

Learn the details of the theft where 25,000 Bitcoins, potentially worth $500,000, were reportedly stolen from a person’s PC. (Maybe the victim exaggerated the size of the stolen sum?)

The notion of Bitcoin as a distributed and anonymous form of currency is capturing the world’s attention. The readers of this blog will find it particularly interesting to consider the implications of the role that such currency can play in the criminal marketplace and online attack activities.

Perhaps Bitcoin might be ahead of its time and maybe its design and implementation is flawed—we will know soon enough. Regardless, it is an idea that will inspire creative thinking in the space of online payments. In the words of Edward Z. Yang, “The future of Bitcoin depends on those who will design its successor. If you are investing substantially in Bitcoin, you should at the very least be thinking about who has the keys to the next kingdom.”

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About the Author

Lenny Zeltser is a seasoned business and technology leader with extensive information security experience. He builds innovative endpoint defense solutions as VP of Products at Minerva Labs. In a previous role, he was responsible for security product management at NCR Corp. Lenny also trains incident response and digital forensics professionals at SANS Institute. He frequently speaks at industry events, writes articles and has co-authored books. Lenny has earned the prestigious GIAC Security Expert designation, has an MBA from MIT Sloan and a Computer Science degree from the University of Pennsylvania.